Posts Tagged ‘Christiane Amanpour’

The CNN/ABC television journalist Christiane Amanpour has been the focus of numerous exposes for her repeated gratuitously nasty and false reporting on Israel and about religious Jews and Christians.

Back in August, 2007, Amanpour hosted a three part CNN series on “God’s Warriors.” Each segment of the series focused on the “extremists” of a different one of each of the three major monotheistic religions: Jewish, Christian and Muslim. Amanpour equated the Jewish and Christian fundamentalists with the fundamentalist Jihadi Muslims. In the segment on “God’s Jewish Warriors,” Amanpour focused on the Jews living in Judea and Samaria, and those in the United States who financially support them.

Andrea Levin, the widely respected executive director of the Committee for Accuracy in Media for Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA) described Amanpour’s reporting in that series as, “the most poisonously biased and factually shoddy feature to air on mainstream television in recent memory.”

Levin writes:

Throughout, Amanpour hammers the claim that Jewish settlements violate international law and she seeks to paint this position as a universally accepted view with a lopsided parade of like-minded commentators.

Yet apart from any judgement about the political advisability of building or not building settlements, many legal scholars argue these communities are, in fact, legal and do not violate Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention as the detractors claim … But not one scholar of this viewpoint is given voice in a two-hour feature largely devoted to decrying settlements and their residents.

Now ABC has chosen Amanpour to host a two part series called “Back to the Beginning.” In this series, ABC describes Amanpour as traveling to the land of the biblical stories from Genesis to Jesus.

Using the Old Testament as a guidebook, “Back to the Beginning” peels back the layers of history and faith that has inspired billions. Amanpour, the veteran war correspondent, wanted to investigate the roots of those stories that have created so much conflict, and at the same time so much of the healing she has seen across her career. It is an extraordinary journey through the deserts and cities of the ancient world, to the historical and pilgrimage sites associated with the epic tale that is the backbone of Judaism, Christianity and Islam today.

But perhaps Amanpour’s anti-Israel bias has abated. It’s been more than five years since her last foray into an exclusively religious focus on the Middle East. Not bloody likely, as her reporting from the Middle East about the recent Hamas-Israel conflict confirms.

Rather than the result of Hamas’s escalating rocket attacks on Israel – more than 130 in the 72 hours before Israel finally responded – Amanpour described the eight day military exchanges as caused by Israel ratcheting up the conflict.

Amanpour presented Israel’s Pillar of Defense as an offensive move, and the “first target was Ahmed El Jabari, a military chief of Hamas, the Islamic political party that governs the Gaza Strip which Israel and the West call a terrorist organization.”

Israel and the West recognize Hamas as a terrorist organization, while Amanpour’s description of Jabari made him sound like a noble Indian chieftain, rather than the mastermind of dozens of Israelis’ deaths, including small children, and of the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit whose release in exchange for more than 1000 Arab Palestinian prisoners catapulted Jibari to Hamas leadership.

In this upcoming series, Amanpour is going to be looking at the “historical and pilgrimage sites associated with the epic tale that is the backbone of Judaism, Christianity and Islam,” according to ABC’s press release. The series is likely to be promoted as fact-based, but Amanpour’s history gives little comfort to those who fear it will be wildly dismissive of Jewish and Christian claims, and naively accepting of Muslim claims.

The ABC series “Back to the Beginnings” will air on Friday evenings, Dec 21 and Dec 28.

Christiane Amanpour (CNN and ABC) vists Yishai Fleisher on the Mount of Olives. Listen in as Yishai and Christiane discuss Jewish life in eastern Jerusalem, why many Jews feel it is important to return to Israel, and more. Then Yishai talks with Nachum Segal on JM in the AM (New Jersey) kosher hot dogs in major league ballparks versus struggling to support Israel.

Yishai and Malkah kick off by talking about a special guest that they received in their home in order to interview Yishai and the range of discussion that followed between the guest and Yishai. They move on to the expiration of the Tal Law and how it has contributed to the collapse of the coalition in the Israeli government. At 12:30, Yishai and Malkah begin to discuss the recent trip to Israel by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her views on the American policy in the Middle East along with discussing how Jonathan Pollard will not be released. They end the segment talking about how everything is looking ahead in Israel and how listeners can get involved!

ABC News decided to put the overtly biased and under-informed Christiane Amanpour in the host chair for “This Week.” The result is a weekly display of journalistic malpractice.

This past Sunday was no different. Questioning David Axelrod, Amanpour assumed the blame for the blow-up of the peace talks will lie in Israel’s hands:

AMANPOUR: I want to first, though, ask you about something very close to what the president has been doing, and that’s Middle East peace. The [construction] moratorium expires tonight.AXELROD: Yes.

AMANPOUR: The president asked the Israeli prime minister to keep the moratorium on. He’s not going to do it. What is going to stop these talks from collapsing?

AXELROD: Well, look, I don’t want to prejudge what’s going to happen in the next many hours.

No possibility in the eyes of the pro-Palestinian Amanpour that the “collapse” is an orchestrated move for Abbas to flee in a huff.

Then there was this:

AMANPOUR: All right. But really a lot of people – I mean, people from all over the world, frankly, say to me here comes a president with a huge mandate, a huge reservoir of goodwill, huge promises to change, and with all of that, his popularity is down. People don’t appreciate some of the amazing legislative agenda that he’s accomplished.Is this a failure of leadership? Has he allowed the opposition to define him? [Emphasis added]Good grief. Is she on the White House payroll?

Not a single tough follow-up. No challenge when Axelrod went on a rant about Republican independent expenditures. She is, for all intents and purposes, doing the administration’s PR work. Contrast that with the questioning of Republican Senator Mitch McConnell:

AMANPOUR: You heard what David Axelrod said about the Republican plan on extending all the Bush-era tax cuts and that it would really, you know, put the country more in hock. Analysts say that’ll cause, you know, add some $4 trillion or so to the national debt. Are you really going to do that? Or do you think there would be a compromise on extending the middle-class tax cuts?

MCCONNELL: Well, let’s understand what we’re talking about here. This has been the tax rate for a decade. We’re talking about raising taxes in the middle of a recession. And most economists think that’s the worst thing you could do. The president himself was saying that was the worst thing you could do a year-and-a-half ago.

AMANPOUR: So do

MCCONNELL: Raising taxes in the middle of a recession is a particularly bad idea, and Republicans don’t think that’s what we ought to do.

AMANPOUR: So do you not think you really, quote, unquote, “hold the middle-class tax cuts hostage” to all the tax cuts you want to

(CROSSTALK)

MCCONNELL: Well, nothing’s being held hostage to anything. It was the Democrats themselves who decided not to have this debate.

AMANPOUR: But would you compromise on that, even after the election?

MCCONNELL: I – I was the only one who offered a bill. There was never a bill in the Senate. And you know why? Thirty-one Democrats in the House, five Democrats in the Senate said they agreed with me, that we ought not to raise taxes in the middle of a recession.

What might happen down the road is not the subject today. The question is, do we want to raise taxes in the middle of a very, very tough economy? All the Republicans think that’s a bad idea, and a substantial number of the Democrats think the same thing.

AMANPOUR: Right, but there’s also this huge thing that the people of the United States are worried about, and that is the deficit.

MCCONNELL: Absolutely.

AMANPOUR: And adding – keeping the tax cuts will add trillions to that. And let me ask you this. According to Howard Gleckman at the Tax Policy Center – let’s see what he’s just written – “McConnell would have to abolish all the rest of the government to get a balance by 2020, everything. No more national parks, no more NIH, no more highway construction, no more homeland security, oh, and no more Congress.”

And on it went in that vein.

The roundtable was even worse as she took up the Obama administration’s defense. Never a skeptical comment or query about the administration’s position or performance.